Gez said:
There is a sort of glorification of the killers. It's pervasive and expressed in other ways (look at all these novels and movies about serial killers; everybody know Hannibal Lecter, but "Will Graham" or "Clarice Starling" won't ring as many bells). The killers are the heroes; they are demigods (Jason, Freddie, etc.). Part of this may be just thrill seeking, since horror movies don't always use a human killer; but there definitely is some sort of idolization of the killers.

I don't know if real life killers are glorified in quite the same way that fictional characters are, though. Anthony Hopkins and Brain Cox (Hannibal Lecter) and Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger) are renowned for being very pleasant guys when not portraying their respective iconic characters, and I'm the sure the same could be said for many or all of the actors who've played Jason Voorhees over the years.

That being said, I can completely buy the idea that disturbed non-fictional people can inspire others to follow in their wake. I'm just saying, you can't get away with the implication that movies inspire real life atrocities any more than you can say that video games are behind them. ;)

printz said:
I already have a bow and arrow though (but not bought by me), but I'm not using it either, in fear of hitting a fellow or a cat by accident during target practice.

It's not clear whether this was intentionally funny or not. Either way, it produced a chuckle.

Looks like a shit stat. The factors used talk about crime "worries". It's more of a poll based "safety feeling" measurement, apparently, which depends on social subjectivity instead of actual crime incidents. In any case, we're talking about shootings here, so what really matters is violent crime, not whether stuff gets stolen or other crimes.

Murder in Russia, for example, is considerably higher than in the US, but Russia is lower down in that index.

Maes said:
As they say "rattlesnakes are harmless unless they bite". It's definitively possible to live an entire lifetime in both places without suffering even as much as a bleeding nose or a black eye just through dumb luck, but the chances of being a victim of an armed burglary or robbery have increased by three and four-digit percentages since the beginning of the crisis. Of course, they were small percentages to begin with, but where do you place the bar for acknowledging that there's a problem? 1/1000000? 1/50000? 1/1000? 1/100? (well... if 1/100 of daily activities was a violent crime, that would be a really bad situation. Even during wartime most activities involve doing something else than pulling a trigger on someone).

Even in shitholes like Brazil's favelas you could say that violent crime is a negligible percentage of the total of daily activities (including non-violent crime), but if you compare it to e.g. Luxembourgh's or Switzerland it will appear thousands of times larger.

help getting some insight. Greece has deteriorated to the level of Russia, Iran and the Philippines as far as crime & safety is concerned. It's ironical that countries like Romania and Albania, have a very low domestic crime rate, while it's a sad statistical fact that many of the alien criminals are indeed, citizens of those countries. This merely means that they managed to export their criminality elsewhere, not that they suddenly became Switzerlands.

So is it really true that a lot of Romanian immigrants are criminals? I thought that was just made up by our media, they really like to paint their own country black.

Romania is not such a bad place (especially compared to other countries) but like in a lot of countries, there are great differences between people.

On one hand we have the middle, upper-middle class districts where normal and generally OK people live but on the other hand we have the outskirts and industrial districts which are PLAGUED by undesirables and gypsies (the worst troublemakers in our country).

The difference can also be seen in high-schools. My mother is a high-school teacher in one of the worst parts of town, I myself have been a student of hers for one semester before transferring and let me tell you, it really is the law of the jungle there. Her old class (the one I was in too) was not so bad but it seems that the people they get each generation get worse and worse. Right now, she is the headmaster of 30 students. 20 of which are gypsies and only 10 are romanians (but they're not much better either). Last week she was almost HIT when she tried to stop two students from beating each other, teachers are literally becoming afraid of their own students!

Now the high-school I transferred to was quite a different story. It was clean, more modern and of course much more civilized.

The immigrants Maes is talking about are likely comprised of the undesirables I was talking about. In our country there is this mentality among our people (mostly among the uneducated leeches) that other countries have salaries so high that everyone has a BMW. While it is true that the average salary here is much lower than in other countries (a teacher gets 300 euros per month) most people don't live THAT badly. It takes only 10 minutes of internet surfing to see that things are not quite like that. So yeah the people Maes is talking about are the uneducated leeches of our country who think that they will get rich fast if they go abroad.

The cynical part of me even tells me that this mentality was instilled by the media as a tactic to get rid of the leeches. The bad side of getting rid of them is that they give honest people a very bad name (especially in Italy)

I would continue this post by saying VERY bad things about gypsies but I don't want to risk getting banned... I kinda see why they are so barbarous though, they have been our slaves for about 400 years until 1859 (although many people don't know this) so it may very well be our fault as well.

As far as I know, guns are illegal here and THANK GOD FOR THAT, I know there are some very bad people who would use them for things other than self-defense.

DoomUK said:
That being said, I can completely buy the idea that disturbed non-fictional people can inspire others to follow in their wake. I'm just saying, you can't get away with the implication that movies inspire real life atrocities any more than you can say that video games are behind them. ;)

My point isn't that fictional violence (be it films, games, books, whatever) leads to real violence, or the reverse. Rather that both come from the same source.

DooM_RO said:
The immigrants Maes is talking about are likely comprised of the undesirables I was talking about.

To be fair, a good percentage of them are actually Gypsies. But since most Gypsies -even if just typically- are citizens of some country, despite many of them being nomads, this does ratchet the "score" up for their country whenever they get associated with some crime. Gypsies however tend to be more associated with begging, hawking and metal theft, rather than violent crime.

There are however lots of violent ones, usually forming a band of co-nationals or teaming up with Albanians or even local Greek criminals for the occasion: those tend to be better armed and more trigger-happy than your average police squad.

It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single *victim* of Columbine? Disturbed people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.

CNN's article says that if the body count "holds up", this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer's face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer's identity? None that I've seen yet. Because they don't sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you've just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.

You can help by forgetting you ever read this man's name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news."

myk said:
You always have some people that stretch arguments in any camp, so that's not really evidence. You're just depicting people with more restrictive gun policy ideas as people who want to ban all guns.

Just to clarify, when I say "a lot" it's different than saying "all", I'm not trying to generalize... my concern is that there are enough people at ground level and enough talking point sellout pieces of shit in the main stream media (including Cenk Uygur who was involved in a genocide against the Armenians that lo and behold involved gun control) for me to believe that America will at some stage go down the same route as Australia and disarm altogether (maybe not in the next 5 years, maybe not even the next 10 years but it seems to be slowly heading toward that general direction) and have an increase in violent crimes and a government that has total control over it's people. To prove my point there is already a bill being introduced as we speak that should it pass, will ban assault rifles in America. ;)

Federal Government: Close the loophole that allows those who are mentally ill to buy guns.

Petition by
Jason Root
South Egremont, MA

Because children, young adults and teachers in our schools continually get massacred in places that should be safe havens of learning by mentally ill people who legally obtain guns.

When a judge deemed Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho a danger to himself due to mental illness in 2005, that ruling should have disqualified him from buying a handgun under federal law.

It didn't.

His slaughter of 32 people on April 16, 2007 raised questions about the efficacy of instant background checks for firearms purchases by the mentally ill, and yet the loophole still exists. Under federal law, anyone who has been judged to be a danger to himself or others because of mental illness, as Cho was, should be prohibited from buying a gun.

What does "mental illness" encompass under federal law? If it potentially includes things like depression and anxiety, I won't sign anything.

Your heart is in the right place, and I'd sign it if it was more specific. But my concern is that, in the event that it's a success, it's going to stop people in the United States from buying a gun if they've so much as had some citalopram prescribed to them. I can't bring myself to sign something that comes with ramifications I don't agree with.

In the eyes of the authority saying what is or isn't mental illness, probably only "oppositional defiant disorder" qualifies.
Let me bitch slap you!
No, please!
That's it, no guns for you, you defiant insolent pest!

Only the government should have guns so there's a nice power monopoly. Everyone should be allowed to carry around their own personal nuclear weapon too, then if anyone so much as sneezes, BLAMMO! That would really hold society together in a nice mutually assured destruction tensegrity. Supposedly slip and falls in the shower and deer hitting cars kills more people than mass shootings, and there's more shootings in cities where guns are banned like chicago/new york city because people can't defend themselves and criminals know only they have guns (I learned that from alex jones, the triple agent stratfor CIA FBI reverse shill memetic warfare super general working for and against the new world order simultaneously. I can't confirm or deny that there are nanobots in the tangy tangerine or what they are programmed to do.).

I think you start playing football theme music on UFC to turn it into a modern day running man/ roman colosseum bread & circuses, then put a lot of recruitment ads in the commercials. You only need to recruit compartmentalized dumb animals, which henry kissinger called them I think, to be used as pawns to kill the rest of the non 1%.

Federal Government: Close the loophole that allows those who are mentally ill to buy guns.

Petition by
Jason Root
South Egremont, MA

Because children, young adults and teachers in our schools continually get massacred in places that should be safe havens of learning by mentally ill people who legally obtain guns.

When a judge deemed Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho a danger to himself due to mental illness in 2005, that ruling should have disqualified him from buying a handgun under federal law.

It didn't.

His slaughter of 32 people on April 16, 2007 raised questions about the efficacy of instant background checks for firearms purchases by the mentally ill, and yet the loophole still exists. Under federal law, anyone who has been judged to be a danger to himself or others because of mental illness, as Cho was, should be prohibited from buying a gun.

Hellbent, just ignore the voices, you don't need a government ban to stop yourself from buying guns if you take your medicine!

DeathevokatioN said:
America will at some stage go down the same route as Australia and disarm altogether (maybe not in the next 5 years, maybe not even the next 10 years but it seems to be slowly heading toward that general direction) and have an increase in violent crimes and a government that has total control over it's people. To prove my point there is already a bill being introduced as we speak that should it pass, will ban assault rifles in America. ;)

From stats I checked, Australia already had increasing violent crime before the gun ban, but it continues to have a very low murder rate, unlike the US. The saying "guns don't kill people, people do" should probably be "guns don't make people violent, they just kill them". US decrease in crime seems to be mostly related to it becoming more of a police State, as there was an increasing number of cops and imprisoned people during the decrease.

Initially, Columbine was blamed on Natural Born Killers, The Basketball Diaries, The Matrix, Doom, Marilyn Manson, the NRA, bullying, and basically everything(so it seemed at the time) except for the two dipshits who actually shot up the school.

Caffeine Freak said:
Initially, Columbine was blamed on Natural Born Killers, The Basketball Diaries, The Matrix, Doom, Marilyn Manson, the NRA, bullying, and basically everything(so it seemed at the time) except for the two dipshits who actually shot up the school.

I honestly think if the media would stop giving these cases the amount of attention that they do, attention that is so often specifically devoted to the perpetrators, there would be less of these types of shootings. Really, when these people posthumously (or not) get their faces splashed across the six o'clock news, it just sends the message to other disturbed individuals that 'hey, if I really want to leave the most damaging impression I can on this world, this is a way to do it.'

Thankfully, I've been seeing a lot of this sentiment echoing across the net the last few days, but that probably won't stop news outlets from continually talking about 'WHAT CAUSED THIS, WHHYYYYYY DID HE DO IT, INSIDE THE MIIINNND OF A KILLLLER.'